Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  “You were supposed to sit and think.”

  She shrugged, unwilling to fight. “Sitting and thinking doesn’t work for me, although I did come up with a few things.”

  “Save them.” He pushed the chair away and jumped off the table. “I have some prisoners for you to meet.”

  Her heartbeat accelerated, and she caught her breath. He hadn’t wanted her to see them until the Warders were done. “Why did you bring them here?”

  “Because Caseo explained his experiments, and I decided he could waste the poison before he destroyed possibly valuable lives.” Her father’s tone was flat, but Jewel heard the anger underneath.

  “You said the prisoners were his.”

  “And they will be,” Rugar said. “When I am done with them.”

  “Have you already questioned them?”

  “I have, and so have a few others. They’re not answering anything.”

  “And so you want me to try? I have no experience with this.”

  “You have more experience with Islanders than most of us here. You’re one of the few who has had a prolonged discussion with them.”

  Jewel’s mouth had gone dry. She had, but the context had been different. “What about Solanda?”

  “She’s not back yet. And we have no Doppelgängers here.”

  “I haven’t been among the Islanders in a year. Surely Burden or some of the others—”

  “They know how to kill the Islanders. If I need help with that, I have an entire campful who will have creative suggestions.” Her father’s flat tone was gone. His frustration was clear. She was finally understanding what he faced.

  The military crew sometimes forgot that the enemy was more than a fighting force, more than creatures to be bested or killed. Since Rugar had isolated the Fey, he had never bothered to get to know the enemy. So Rugar was going to have to rely on Jewel’s very meager experience.

  “Where are they?” she asked.

  “The extra room,” he said. “I wanted to talk with you alone first.”

  She nodded. The prisoners couldn’t really escape anyway. The guards were more for show. They would be trapped in the Shadowlands, unable to get out. But if they got their hands on the poison, they would be able to do a lot of damage.

  She went down the hall, tucking the loose strands of hair into her braid and tugging on her leather vest. Her exhaustion had lifted at the thought of seeing the prisoners. She half hoped Nicholas would be among them. She had wanted to see him again, to talk with him, so that she could better understand what had happened between them that day. By all rights they should have slaughtered each other. Instead they had toyed with each other as if they were childhood sweethearts.

  Her cheeks flushed at the memory. No man, not even her dear friend Burden, had brought such an instant response. She knew what her grandfather would say if she was to tell him of the event. Go with the magick, girl. It was his phrase and, he said, the secret to his long life as Black King.

  Go with the magick.

  She flung open the door. All three prisoners were sitting. Their wrists and ankles were bound, and another rope bound them to chairs. The ropes looked loose, so the Warders must have placed an additional binding on the three. They were looking down, but none of them had that magnificent blond hair she remembered of Nicholas.

  “It is rude to snub someone who has just entered a room,” she said in Nye. Her Islander was still poor, even though she now had some of the basics.

  The man farthest to her left raised his head. He wasn’t as old as her father, but he wasn’t young either. His long face had crow’s-feet near the eyes, and a sensitive mouth. The squareness of his features startled her. Islanders were like Fey made without whimsy. “It is also rude to tie your guests to their chairs.”

  She smiled. Perhaps all Islander men were verbally aggressive. “Point taken,” she said. “But you are not a guest.”

  The center man bit his lower lip and stared at her. He was little more than a boy, with a boy’s leanness and lack of grace. His pale skin had acne scars, and his eyes, deep and blue, were wide with fear.

  “I couldn’t have got here on my own,” the first man said. “Your friends brought me. Where I come from, that makes me a guest.”

  Jewel nodded. “Where I come from, that makes you a prisoner.”

  “Wh-what plan you to do us?” the boy asked. The boy’s Nye was poor. He had clearly never been off the Isle.

  The third man shushed him. As he turned to the boy, the third man’s profile revealed a hawkish nose and thin lips.

  “I’ll give the orders here,” Jewel said.

  The third man glanced at her as if seeing her for the first time. He was older than the others, his eyes as narrow as the rest of him. He didn’t like her. She could feel the hatred come off him in waves.

  “That’s because you ain’t tied up, bitch,” he said. His Nye seemed as poor as the boy’s, but it was clearly an affectation. He had a stronger mastery of the colloquialisms than any other Islander she had heard of.

  “Oh,” she said, keeping her tone light, “I suspect I would give the orders whether I was tied up or not. In Shadowlands the Fey dominate.”

  “But not on the Isle,” the third man said.

  “Not yet,” she said agreeably, and closed the door.

  The third man said something to the others in Islander. She caught the words “alone” and “us” combined with what she believed was another curse specifically designed for women.

  “You will speak Nye or you will never speak again,” she said.

  The color fled from the boy’s face. “Sorry, missus,” he said, “but Nye—a—no is—for me.”

  “You do just fine.” She smiled at him and kept her voice gentle. He would be easy to break.

  The third man spoke to the boy in Islander. She heard him use the word “play.” He understood, then, that she was toying with them. She pulled her knife off her belt, walked over to him, and grabbed him by his hair. It was coarse and greasy and smelled of sweat and dirt. It hadn’t been washed in days. She pulled his head back and placed the knife against his grime-encrusted cheek.

  “I told you that you will speak in Nye or never speak again,” she said. “Would you like me to cut out your tongue from the inside of your mouth or through your throat?”

  “Lady! Please!” the boy cried.

  The first man snapped something at the boy. The curtness and the directness in his tone made it sound like a name.

  “I am speaking to you, old man,” she said.

  “You expect me to apologize to you, bitch?” he asked, his voice hoarse from the pressure of her knife.

  “What I said was that you are to speak Nye. I don’t care if you apologize to me or not. My ego isn’t fragile, but I prefer you to speak in a language I understand. If you can’t follow that direction, you won’t speak at all. Is that clear?”

  “When you make threats,” the man said, “you should follow through on them.”

  “You’re right,” she said. She took the knife away from his neck. It left a small cut. She wiped the blood off on his shirt and shoved the knife back into the hilt. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  She opened the door, called her father in Fey, and asked him to send Burden into the room. She heard him yell for Burden, then heard Burden’s affirmative response. She left the door open, then turned to face the prisoners. The third man watched her, chin up, blood dribbling down his neck. The first man looked more relaxed, and the boy’s eyes were wet.

  When Burden came in, he closed the door.

  “Take him out of here,” she said in Fey, pointing to the third man. She walked over to his chair. In Nye she said, “The Warders want to use you to find out what makes Islanders work. They need you alive for that and wouldn’t be too happy if I killed you—even accidentally. So they will remove your tongue—you won’t need it, anyway—and then they can start work on you.”

  “It’s a bluff,” the man said.

  “She neve
r bluffs,” Burden said. He came up behind and untied the rope that held the man to the chair, lifting him easily by one armpit. “Say good-bye to your friends, because you won’t be able to speak to them after this.”

  “Ort, say you will. Please!” the boy said in his poor Nye.

  “Sorry,” Jewel said softly. “But he was right. A woman should always make good on her threats. That way she is taken seriously.”

  The first man was watching her without fear, as if he was studying her. He had a different kind of intelligence from his friend. The older man—Ort?—had more bravado than courage. But this man had strength.

  She returned her attention to Ort. “Get him out of here,” she said to Burden in Nye. Then she added in Fey, “Have the Healers put a silence spell on him—and keep him away from Caseo.”

  “My pleasure,” Burden said in the same language. He pushed Ort ahead of him and ordered him forward in Nye. When they left the room, Jewel closed the door behind them.

  “Now,” she said. “We’ll begin again. I prefer to speak in Nye. While you are here, you will speak only Fey or Nye, even between yourselves. And you will answer our questions.”

  “No know Fey,” the boy said, his voice breathless.

  “And you barely know Nye,” Jewel responded with a smile. “That’s all right. You’ll learn.”

  “So you don’t speak Islander,” the first man said.

  “I don’t care for the language. It is too harsh,” she said. She ran a hand on this man’s cheek, getting her fingers—still stained with Ort’s blood—close enough to his nostrils that he could smell the rusty-iron odor. “And what is your name?”

  The muscles in his face stiffened. She could feel the movement under her fingertips. “Does it matter?” he asked. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

  She smiled, slid her hand down, and chucked his chin before moving away. He had stubble there, like the men of Nye. “If we were going to kill you,” she said, “we would have done it before bringing you in here.”

  “You would—a—have die Ort,” the boy said.

  “No,” she said, keeping her tone reasonable. “If he doesn’t cooperate with me, I will simply make him wish he had died. And, unfortunately, now he won’t even be able to say so.”

  She took Ort’s chair, shook the ropes off it, and swung it around so that she could sit, facing them. “I would like to know your name,” she said again to the first man.

  “It’s not important.”

  She leaned her head back, just a little. “Well, then, you’ll need to explain this to me. In Oudoun they believe that true names should be hidden, that someone who knows a true name has power over the person whose name it is. Yet the Nyeians never said the Islanders believed that. Is this because they felt we didn’t need to know? Or do you think they wanted to give us an advantage?”

  The boy looked confused. Either she was speaking too quickly for him, or this wasn’t a custom. He looked at the man, then back at her.

  “Are you afraid of me?” she asked him.

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Something like anger flickered over the man’s face, but it disappeared so quickly she wasn’t able to identify it. “Let the boy be,” he said. “He shouldn’t have come with us.”

  “Then why did he?” she asked, willing to let them take her where they would.

  “Asked,” the boy said. “And—”

  “He has never fought before. He was a last-minute choice. He should be home with his family.” Two spots of color appeared on the man’s cheek. She liked his courage.

  “You should have thought of that before you allowed him along,” Jewel said.

  The boy glanced back and forth between them. “Can hurt it? To tell names?” he said to the man.

  The man sighed. “No, I suppose not. Everyone knows anyway.”

  By that she assumed he meant everyone outside. When the three weren’t among the dead, or part of the returning wounded, the others would guess that they were among the prisoners. Rugar had been very firm with the Fey force. Allow some Islanders to return. Let them know that the Fey had captured both poison and prisoners. That might turn the tide a bit.

  “The more you help us, the kinder we will be,” Jewel said.

  “We heard—” the boy said, deliberately avoiding the man’s eyes “—the Fey—” and he used the Fey name for themselves, an odd choice, she thought “—not kind.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “We aren’t in battle. No one should be. But we’re not in battle now. You are prisoners, and you need to figure out a way to keep yourselves alive.”

  “What do you plan for us?” the man asked.

  She saw no harm in telling him that. He would never escape, and if he was allowed to go free, any stories she told would make the Fey even more frightening—one of Rugar’s goals. “We plan to discover what makes you different from the Nye. We can do that verbally, or we can let some of our experts figure that out their own way.”

  “Cultural differences?” the man asked.

  “And physical,” she said.

  The boy didn’t understand the exchange. He probably didn’t know the words. But the man knew the words and the subtext. All the color had left his face.

  “He’s a boy,” the man said.

  She nodded. “Useful. Too bad we didn’t capture any of your women.”

  “Women?” He seemed stunned at the idea.

  “If you’re different, they have to be different too,” she said.

  “Different?” he asked.

  “From us.” Her words were soft, and for a moment he looked perplexed. Only at that time did she notice the similarity between their races: when he frowned, his eyebrows rose like wings. And she nearly gasped from the wonder of it. What if they were all related on some level, as fish were related, as cats were related? That the Fey were not a different kind of creature, but a superior version of the same creature, something that all Islanders could aspire to. It would explain their poison water: somehow they had reached a Fey-like plateau without realizing it, and the effect on the real Fey was devastating.

  “We’re different,” he said. “We’re not aggressive.”

  “You do quite well,” she said, thinking of all the dead and wounded she had seen that morning.

  “No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean. You people have this odd desire to take over everything. We’re content to live on our Isle without interference. Why don’t you just leave us alone?”

  And in his words she heard another voice: All that death for something we would have given you. She shook off the memory as something to save until later. “We are not a commercial people. It’s better to own something than to pay for it, don’t you think?”

  “You can’t own everything,” the man said. “You can’t own me no matter what you do to me. Even if you control my body, my thoughts will remain mine.”

  She stared at him, wondering if his naïveté was genuine. Then she remembered that they had had no contact with the Fey before this year, and knew nothing of Doppelgängers. “Then you should have no problem in giving me your name,” she said.

  He leaned back in his chair, a smile touching his face. The ropes were cutting into his clothes, making an oily crease on the filthy fabric. He didn’t seem to notice. “Adrian,” he said. “And my son, Luke.”

  So in trade he gave her three pieces of information, the connection being the most useful. The boy was staring at him, confusion even more evident. Adrian was right: the boy should have stayed home.

  “Your son isn’t fluent in Nye,” she said.

  “We didn’t think he would need it.” The “we” surprised her. A woman back home, perhaps, who helped him with decisions? Solanda had said that women did not do such things in Islander society. Another man, then? The older one?

  “So he is not your only son.”

  Adrian started. The question had caught him by surprise.

  Her smile grew. “The olde
st son learns the trade. The younger sons till the fields. Is that how it goes?”

  “No,” he said. “The oldest son inherits.”

  “And what becomes of the younger sons?” The favored son, she guessed, from the warmth evident between them.

  “Whatever they choose.”

  “You send them into the world with nothing and hope they will survive?”

  Adrian shrugged. “I did.”

  She crossed her legs, letting her right ankle rest on her left knee. “So you do have ownership,” she said. “And you struggle to maintain the size of the land. We do not. We all inherit, so the land must increase, or we would have an ever-diminishing holding.”